We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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There is strategic competition with economic rivals, notably China, especially around advanced technology, supply-chain dominance, and industrial sovereignty.
But tariffs raise costs for domestic firms that rely on imported components, in some cases hurting US manufacturers rather than helping them. Indeed, recent data show US manufacturing has contracted, with some firms citing tariffs as a reason for layoffs or relocation. Retaliation from trade partners can offset gains via higher tariffs abroad, disrupted supply chains, and increased uncertainty.
The welfare benefits of rising domestic output are modest under many models because gains might be outweighed by efficiency losses, higher consumer prices, and reduced variety. And the government risks politicizing trade decisions, which may lead to cronyism or poorly targeted protection by helping politically connected sectors rather than broadly boosting national economic health
– Madsen Pirie
I support the jury system as I support democracy: it is the worst system of justice around, except for all the others. My own experience of serving on a jury was inspiring in some ways, frustrating in others. The current Labour government wants to abolish them for all but the most serious cases. Assuming Sir Keir Starmer and Mr David Lammy MP are sincere in their claim that all they want to do is speed up justice, are there any better ways to do that than denying the accused their ancient right to a jury of their peers?
David Friedman was recently summoned to present himself for jury service in the US. He seems to have been sent home without ever reaching the jury-box. I have the impression that the the American courts turn away a higher percentage of those called to jury service than the UK courts do, and also that they make much more of a fuss about excluding jurors who might be biased, which over there often seems to mean in effect excluding jurors who might be intelligent. Despite this and many other differences between the two systems, not all of which favour the UK, I think that Professor Friedman’s observations on the careless way in which jurors’ time was wasted might be relevant to us here. The underlying reason Friedman and his fellow jurors (or whatever the word is for people who are called to be jurors but are not chosen) got to know every crack in the courthouse wall was that the people who have power to speed up or slow down cases pay next to nothing for the jurors’ time. Friedman writes:
What most struck me, as an economist, about the process was the implication of its having access to nearly free labor — there was no payment for the first day, fifteen dollars a day thereafter. The courthouse was towards the south end of the county, about half an hour’s drive from me, forty-five minutes from the north end. We were told that the jurors were selected at random, with no attempt to select jurors for cases in the south courthouse from the south end of the county — because doing that would have biased the selection, how was not explained.
Out of more than eighty of us called in only about twenty-one were put through the voir dire process. The rest were presumably there in case more were eliminated, but it is hard to see how that could justify calling in that many. A jury system that took the value of our time seriously could have called in half as many, perhaps fewer, and, if that occasionally turned out not to be sufficient, additional candidates the next day. By the end of the first day they knew that they had most of the jurors they needed, could have saved most of the rest of us the time and the trip.
Further evidence is how our time in the courthouse was used. We arrived the first day by nine, were sent home at four, a total of seven hours on site. Of those seven hours we spent most of an hour waiting to be told what room we were to go to, an hour and a half for lunch, two hour long breaks. We were actually involved in the jury selection process for less than three hours out of seven.
That again looks like a result of treating our time as a free good, but I do not know enough about what else was happening to be certain. Running a trial, even the preliminaries to a trial, involves coordinating the activity of multiple people: juror candidates, the judge, the attorneys, perhaps others. My guess is that if the county had to pay a market rate for our time they would have found a schedule that used it more efficiently but I could be wrong.
I have so far interpreted what I observed as evidence that the people responsible did not care how much of our time was spent in the process, since our attendance was compulsory and the price paid for it low, on the first day zero, but there is another possible interpretation of the evidence.
→ Continue reading: Want to save money on jury trials? Try paying jurors!
The postponement of elections has always been an echo of contemporary catastrophe, as one the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rides roughshod over the land. War, Pestilence, these were the grim riders that justified such extraordinary measures, halting the democratic process only when the very survival of the nation hung in the balance. But now, in 2025, we witness the emergence of a fifth horseman, one more insidious and mundane: Tyranny, or perhaps better named, Bureaucracy. Cloaked in the guise of administrative reform and devolution, this ethereally dull and shadowy figure has been unleashed by the Labour government, in collusion with Conservative councils, to trample upon the democratic rights of millions.
– Gawain Towler
Which brings us to Nigel Farage. This week we received yet another reminder that the supposed “liberals” will stop at nothing – and I mean nothing – to prevent him from becoming Prime Minister, just as they previously did everything in their power to reverse the Brexit referendum. The coming battle will be both political and deeply personal. We have already witnessed attempts to manipulate the democratic process; that may prove mild compared with what will be unleashed on the Reform UK leader in the months ahead.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking. The very same commentators who accused Kemi Badenoch of being too harsh on Rachel Reeves during her Budget response are now hurling grotesque slurs at the MP for Clacton, branding him a neo-Nazi. The BBC even joined in. A segment on Radio 4’s Today programme questioned Mr Farage’s “relationship when he was younger with Hitler”, a framing so ludicrous it was almost comical, were the implications not so serious. Suddenly, a chorus of self-appointed critics has emerged, eager to throw decades-old allegations at the wall in the hope that something, anything, might stick.
– Camilla Tominey (£)
That is not how wealth works of course. The people who have piles of money do not in fact have piles of money they’ve got piles of paper signifying ownership of companies and businesses.
Which leads to the third problem with the idea. Which is that taxing these billionaires on their stacks of ownership of assets does not, in fact, free up money into the economy. It doesn’t reverse hoarding that is – just changes who hoards.
– Tim Worstall
What Putin understands – and what Britain refuses to face – is that Europe is vulnerable in ways that matter more than tanks or troop numbers. Russia’s president does not need to defeat Nato militarily to cause chaos. As he has already shown through repeated greyzone attacks, Europe’s power grids, subsea cables, energy systems and communications networks offer targets far easier to strike, far harder to defend and politically far more disruptive. Putin’s warning this week was a reminder that Russia knows exactly where our exposed nerves lie.
– Sam Olsen (£)
“Live facial recognition cameras planned for every town centre”, reports today’s Telegraph.
Police could be given access to Britain’s passport database to catch criminals under an expansion of facial recognition technology that could be deployed in every city, town and village.
Labour is proposing that police be allowed to compare photos of crime suspects from CCTV, doorbells and dashcams against facial images on government databases, including the passports of 45 million Britons, and immigration records.
The plans are part of a Home Office consultation launched on Thursday to establish a legal framework for all police forces to use facial recognition technology to catch wanted criminals and crime suspects.
As a commenter on the UK Politics subreddit called Eldritch_Lemonade observes,
Oh look, it’s taken 3 months to go from rolling out 10 vans with facial recognition to be used in specific and targeted ways to every town in the country scanning your face constantly
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/live-facial-recognition-technology-to-catch-high-harm-offenders
That Home Office “news story” with the title “Live Facial Recognition technology to catch high-harm offenders” to which Eldritch_Lemonade linked was issued on 13 August 2025. Naughty Eldritch was exaggerating with the “three months”; it’s nearer four. A whole three months and three weeks ago the Home Office reassured us that…
The new vans will operate according to strict rules, which ensure they are only deployed when there is specific intelligence. The College of Policing has clear guidance on how the technology should be used.
These vehicles enable law enforcement to target and locate wanted criminals and suspects for the most serious crimes including sex offences, violent assaults, homicide and serious and organised crime. Forces already using LFR have used it to arrest rape, domestic abuse, knife crime and robbery suspects as well as sex offenders breaching their conditions. The technology has also been used to maintain safety at big public events.
Existing safeguards require checks only to be done against police watchlists of wanted criminals, suspects and those subject to bail or court order conditions like sex offenders. Watchlists are bespoke to every deployment, with officers following strict guidance from the College of Policing guidance when composing a list.
“I fear that today’s way of life is not our strength but has become our weakness. It has become debilitating and corrupting. The two world wars spawned an enlarged public sector that has, in the past 30 years, become the insatiable cuckoo in the next, pushing out other activities by absorbing resources, increasing debt, raising taxes, creating unproductive employments, encouraging people not to work, over-regulating while under-performing, promoting mass immigration to feed its preference for cheap labour, and destroying vital industries in the pursuit of a green fantasy. It has created dependency and encouraged irresponsibility – all the more damaging in a society that has jettisoned much of its identity and pride. I have never felt more pessimistic about our ability to change.
“Our `progressives’ still inhabit a dream-world: globalisation, `rules-based order’, open borders and the EU. They depend on perpetual public sector expansion for their existence,. This is, say Labour MPs, `in the party’s DNA’. It cannot face reality, as the recent Budget shows. The only part of the public sector not in their DNA is defence. The Liberal Democrats and Greens are even worse. A coalition of the three would be a nightmare.
“We cannot defend ourselves while the present system prevails. Hence the contempt of Trump and Putin. People have of course been saying this for years and like the boy who cried wolf, they have been ignored. Now, however, the wolf is at the door.”
– Robert Toombs, Daily Telegraph (£)
I called the author “richard” – apologies for the goof.
Late stage capitalism is really just early stage socialism. Every problem you blame on markets comes from the state’s power to interfere, distort, and pick winners. But instead of stopping and reflecting, socialists double down. The more government creates the very conditions they complain about, the more they demand even more of the thing that caused it. It’s ideological autopilot. No thinking, no introspection, just reflexive calls for the same poison in a higher dose.
There’s no such thing as late stage capitalism, or state capitalism, there’s just capitalism.
– Rock Chartrand
‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’
But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press.
Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP.
– Michael Collins with an absolutely stonking article on Spiked
Richard Hanania once wrote about how the measures of freedom calculated by NGOs like Freedom House were skewed and worthless, because they were more concerned with those interpersonal freedoms than with actual concrete liberties. What matters to most people is simply whose side you’re on, and it goes without saying that a Right-wing European regime in which police turned up at people’s doors for expressing unfashionable opinions would be roundly condemned – and rightly so.
What makes our anarcho-tyranny all the more illiberal is that no one can be entirely sure what exactly are the unfashionable opinions deemed worthy of the state’s interference. In recent years moral norms have changed so quickly that people can find themselves in trouble for saying things that were totally mainstream ten years ago. In many cases they might not even be aware about the unspoken edict that such an opinion is now verboten, and I suspect it is not a coincidence that so many of the individuals caught out by this new tyranny have some form of autism.
– Ed West
“The great heroes of capitalism are the entrepreneurs who can feel the future in their bones and will do anything to bring it into being — fanatics who are compelled to build castles in the air, as Joseph Schumpeter put it. The biggest beneficiaries of these innovations are consumers who are showered with products and services beyond the dreams of previous generations. Capitalism may have made accommodations with some horrible regimes and vile practices in the past, as Beckert shows in detail. But as a system it thrives best in conditions of freedom, where government power is limited, property rights secure and businesspeople left alone to pursue their dreams and subject them to the stern test of the market.”
– Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg ($), in one of his best recent columns IMHO, gently taking apart a new book by Sven Beckert that purports to show how we have become rich primarily through violence and enslavement, not mutual exchange. The book is apparently more than 1,300 pages long, and the largest ever published by Penguin. To write a book that long, and miss the key elements of why free enterprise is as great as it is, seems a lot of work for scant reward. Alas, I suspect Beckert’s book will be treated as reverently on parts of the Left as Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster, which turned out to be built on proverbial sand.
A recent Nobel prizewinner in economics, Joel Mokyr, has written a book that I think rather more accurately identifies why, for instance, the UK became as wealthy as it did during the Industrial Revolution, and plays far more attention to the role of ideas. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes is also a good study, in my view. Anything by Deidre McCloskey is also good.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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